By Patrick Jackson on 2021-04-27 01:02 in Joomla! Volunteer Engagement Team

Participants: Patrick Jackson, Laura Gordon, Benjamin Trenkle, Philip Walton, Shirielle Williams,

Apologies: Luca Marzo, Jaz Parkyn, Davide Messia, Llewellyn van der Merwe,

Absent without notice: Chris Keen,  Mark Bender, Hugh Douglas-Smith, Niels Braczek, Marianela Queme, Hugh Douglas-Smith, Marco Dings, David Aswani

Meeting started 20:00 UTC

Team Leader’s Report

For a second month in a row, the VET team’s been distracted from VET tasks by their involvement in various other Joomla activities:

• JoomlaDay USA: Laura, Shirielle

• GSoC: Philip, Benjamin, Llewellyn, Patrick, Shirielle

• Events & JUG Teams: Shirielle, Philip, Benjamin, David A, Laura, Patrick

I’d like to recognise all these contributions and congratulate teams on various successes in reaching over 400 people in the community via the activities so far in April, and more are in line to be reached by Events Department outreach to all JUGs to refresh the database during May.

With time consuming aspects of those projects now out of the way, the VET plans to focus back on current projects during May and June to further progress work done over the past six months.

Assistant Team Leader

No nominations have been received yet for Assistant Team Leader. Patrick Jackson will be looking at recruiting an additional team member who can focus on ATL role, leaving rest of the team to focus on projects and other teams they’re involved in.

Discussion during the meeting was to look to finding some suitable students from the pool interested in GSoC to additionally provide mentoring support and get them more involved in the project.

Vision, Mission and Goals

The team moved to adopt the updated Vision, Mission and Goals statement. The motion was passed unanimously by those in attendance.

The final updated version keeps the sentiment of the previous drafts, but changes some wording to better reflect the positive direction the VET should be taking at all times. Some phrasing in the draft, though innocent-sounding, had some wording that shed negative connotations on whether the VET could achieve those goals.

During the discussion, consensus was also that having a document like this is fine, however actions are going to speak much louder, and the VET will now be aiming to focus on constant delivery of recruitment, retention and recognition programs.

Help Wanted Project

The Help Wanted Project next stage is to create an interim replacement version of the How to Contribute to Joomla page during May. Phase 1 is to simply get more up to date information in place about the current ways to contribute to Joomla as

Phase 2 is to further expand the Contribute page to implement a more detailed tool for volunteers to contribute by searching for ways to contribute by indicating the time they have available and/or the skills that they are wanting to contribute. For more information on Phase 2 contact Patrick Jackson or Laura Gordon.

Other Project Teams

• Onboarding Project Team are scheduling a meeting in the next few weeks to further get that project moving again.

• Community Openings Team continue to deliver the monthly JCM article, but will be looking more at ways to measure the success of the articles as TLs are reporting back that positions are not being filled.

• Company Engagement Project Team will be scheduling a meeting in the next few weeks to look at some new concepts that have come up in various conversations in recent months.

GSoC Engagement

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) this year interacted with 240 students in the lead up to proposals closing mid-April for the 2021 GSoC intake. 131 proposals were received (many from additional students who had not interacted prior to submitting their proposal). At the end of the selection process, just a handful of students (1 - 5 depending on the number of final slots Joomla receives) will be selected.

GSoC and VET have a crossover through Philip Walton, Patrick Jackson, and Benjamin Trenkle. They have been working on preparing a range of communications to GSoC students that will be sent out once the selection process closes mid May:

• Inviting students who did not submit a proposal to continue to get involved in Joomla, highlighting various ways to contribute - which leads into the new Contribute page.

• Encouraging students who did submit a proposal to get involved more to look at improving their applications for future GSoC proposals. This will include how to contribute, as well as some resources to give them general feedback on things that were missing from their GSoC proposals, and ways to improve their Joomla coding skills going forward.

Already through the communication process in the past two months over 30 students have joined channels like Bugs and Fun at Home to continue their involvement in Joomla.

JoomlaDay USA Post Event Engagement

Two key activities at JoomlaDay USA will see very different types of ongoing engagement with event attendees.

• On Friday April 23, 24 conference attendees participated in the Mini Pizza Bugs and Fun event, learning more about squashing bugs and other ways of contributing. JDay USA will be providing a list of those participants to the VET to then follow up and invite them to join Glip and the Bugs and Fun at Home channel, as well as direct them to the contribution page to have them find out more about ways to get involved.

• Joomla (via the board’s event sponsorship) had an expo booth as part of the event. Based on visits to the booth, a mixture of new volunteers and rebooted volunteers look to be coming onboard across various roles. Of particular interest are some reengagements with some Joomlers with previous historic involvement across the project who look to be in a position to restore some gaps in accumulated knowledge lost by the retirement/resignation of members at various times over the years

Meeting finished 20:47 UTC